
Class ^ 

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THE EDUCATION 
OF BOYS 

BY 

CONDE B. PALLEN,Ph.D.,LL.D. 




NEW YORK 
THE AMERICA PRESS 

1916 



\CA* 6 



nihil PUstat 

REMEGIUS LAFORT, S.T.D. 

Censor 

HmjJrimatu* 

JOHN CARDINAL FARLEY 

Archbishop of New York 

March 30 t 1916 



Copyright, 1916, by 
The America Press 



0. 9 

5 1916 



©CLA431519 



FOREWORD 

These letters on the Christian educa- 
tion of boys were published serially some 
years ago in the Dolphin, an admirable 
magazine for the Catholic laity, whose 
brief but useful career was due to the 
scholarly zeal of the Reverend H. J. Heu- 
ser. It is with Father Heuser's kind per- 
mission, that the series is here reproduced 
in a more permanent form. 

I believe that the letters are more per- 
tinent now than when they first saw the 
light in the pages of the Dolphin. The un- 
happy practice of sending Catholic boys to 
non-Catholic educational institutions has 
been waxing rather than waning. I know 
the ancient excuse that there are exceptions, 
i. e., circumstances which justify the prac- 
tice on the part of some parents, but when 
exceptions cease to prove the rule and be- 
gin to be the rule among a certain type of 

iii 



iv FOREWORD 

Catholics, it should give us pause. Per- 
sonally I have never met an exception that 
would bear analysis. When boiled down 
to the real ingredients, parental weakness 
or parental ambition proves generally to 
be the residue. Either the boy determines 
the choice out of his own immaturity and 
ignorance of danger, or the parent weighs 
a pseudo-worldly advantage over against 
the spiritual hazard and tips the beam 
against the Faith. If there be real excep- 
tions, they are like the stories of the man- 
eating shark and the sea-serpent. I do not 
deny their possibility, but I am prone to 
skepticism. 

When I look at results I see disaster as 
the rule. It is a rare and extraordinary boy 
who gets a non-Catholic education and re- 
mains stanch all through and always. 
Either the Faith is entirely lost or becomes 
so diluted that it disappears entirely in 
the second generation. As for the coun- 
ter-charge, sometimes advanced by the ad- 
vocates of the exceptions, that even some 
Catholic boys who have received a Catholic 
education, abandon their Faith in after 



FOREWORD v 

years, I can only say that this unfortu- 
nately happens sometimes; not, however, 
because they have received a Catholic edu- 
cation, but in spite of their Catholic edu- 
cation. Some well-trained boys afterwards 
become criminals in spite of their excellent 
home and school training. It would be 
foolish to advocate the abolition of the Ten 
Commandments, because some people, who 
have been reared under their discipline, 
refuse in later life to observe them. 

The singular notion is sometimes enter- 
tained that education is like a man's ap- 
parel, an external adornment, whose fash- 
ion constitutes its value. Education is not 
only more than a man 's apparel, it is even 
more than his skin ; it belongs to the mar- 
row of his being. It is the making of his 
character, and has to do with the immortal 
and most intimate part of man's nature, his 
soul. The Church has always understood 
this, wherefore she fully realizes that re- 
ligion is educative and education is relig- 
ious, and that the natural fusing of the two 
in one makes a man to be what he ought to 
be, a completely balanced rational animal. 



vi FOREWORD 

This is the ground I take in these letters. 
It is the only sane ground even for tem- 
poral salvation. Even the ancient pagans 
understood it, and when they ceased to 
practise it their civilization fell into decay 
and they perished. 

Conde B. Pallet*. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

iii 



Foreword 

I. The Flowing Tide .... 9 

II. Our Eesponsibilities as Parents . . 16 

III. The Vital Principle in Education . 24 

IV. Not a Loss 35 

V. On the Source of Eesignation . . 39 

VI. On Disciplining Young Children . 43 

VII. A Sweeping Charge and a Eebuttal 50 

VIII. Truth versus Knowledge as the End 

of Education 59 

IX. Specialism in Education ... 68 

X. Electivism in Education . . .76 

XI. Utilitarianism in Education and a 

Classical Flourish ... 84 

XII. The Object of the Classics in Edu- 
cation 90 

XIII. Education and Taste .... 95 

XIV. The World versus God in Education 101 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

I 

The Flowing Tide. 

My Dear Henry: 

You may be sure that I was delighted to 
hear from you and learn all about you and 
yours after so long an interval. It will, 
indeed, afford me much pleasure to resume 
our long interrupted correspondence, bro- 
ken off, I know not how, so many years ago. 
We easily drift apart on the currents of 
life : distance, diversity of pursuits and in- 
terests soon divide us, as we each seek our 
several ways in the divergent avocations 
that open up before us. But I am sincerely 
glad to get word from you again, and re- 
new those old ties which held us so closely 
together in the freshness of our youth and 
the buoyancy of our early hopes, when life 

9 



10 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

was very fair to look upon. As we get on 
in years we learn to appreciate more fully 
the affection of sincere friendship. When 
we look with the sober eyes of experience 
through the long vista of the past, how 
clearly we see what might have been, and 
realize how carelessly we have allowed 
much that is precious to drift idly away 
from us. I have often thought of this in 
regard to our early friendship, and have 
been moved to write you in the hope of its 
renewal, but deferring action for one or 
another reason at the time, I allowed the 
thief, procrastination, to steal away the 
golden resolve. 

Though not hearing from you, I have 
heard of you several times in recent years. 
Once through our old college mate, Jack 
Hutton, who called upon me some two 
years ago as he was passing through my 
city. He gave me a very glowing account 
of your prosperity and success; how high 
you stand in your community and how sub- 
stantially you have advanced in the affairs 
of life. I was about to write you then, 
but I was called away on an important 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 11 

business matter to another city, and so 
again deferring, the delay proved fatal. 
But now that you have written, I am more 
than glad to bridge our long silence and re- 
sume the familiar intercourse of "auld 
lang syne." 

You write me, you say, with a very defi- 
nite purpose and on a very vital matter, 
about which you are somewhat perplexed. 
You are right, my dear friend; nothing 
could be of greater moment or fraught with 
higher responsibilities than the question 
of the education of your boys. Indeed, I do 
not know what concern in a father's life 
carries with it such tremendous duties. I 
have often trembled in my own soul upon 
thinking of the far-reaching results of a 
father's direction and guidance in this af- 
fair of education. Into our hands are com- 
mitted the destinies of precious souls ! It 
is a fearful trust ! What a burden we take 
upon our shoulders when we accept the 
cares of paternity ! I, for one, would fairly 
stagger under the heavy responsibilities 
which it entails, did I not feel and appre- 
ciate the aids and alleviations of our Faith. 



12 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

As it is, the Church is so definite in her 
teaching in this regard, so insistent, so un- 
mistakably clear, and so helpfully direc- 
tive, that I have but to follow her wisdom 
to make the burden sweet and the yoke 
light. 

By this I do not, of course, mean that the 
Church takes the affair off my hands. Not 
at all; she illuminates and guides my re- 
sponsibilities, but leaves them mine none 
the less. In fact, she emphasizes my re- 
sponsibilities by a tremendous enforce- 
ment. She declares that upon the proper 
fulfilment of my paternal duties in this af- 
fair of education depends in great measure 
my own salvation; neglect here is at the 
peril of my own soul! The greater the 
dangers and the temptations around us, 
the more ardent, the more zealous, the 
more outspoken, the more pressing does 
she become in prompting, urging and di- 
recting us, nay, more, in imperatively de- 
manding our obedience, where she sees we 
would easily succumb to the dread peril of 
recreancy under the stress of seductive and 
constant temptations. 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 13 

For you must have realized, as I have, 
the vast and unremitting forces in our day 
and country, which are constantly pulling 
against the anchorage of the Faith in the 
hearts of our people. The social and polit- 
ical traditions around us are not rooted in 
the Faith; our present surroundings are 
distinctly un-Catholic and are becoming, 
day by day, more secularized, until the life 
about us has become practically desuper- 
naturalized, if I may use the expression. 
In our relations with our fellow-men, the 
vast majority of whom have not the faint- 
est idea of what the Faith is, nay, rather, 
oftener know it only as it has been de- 
formed in their eyes by the calumnies and 
misrepresentations of long generations of 
bigoted hostility, there are ten thousand 
filaments of ignorance, prejudice, and mis- 
understanding, that are woven around us 
to hold us down bound and gagged, as Gul- 
liver by the Lilliputians, until we too often 
passively submit under the false impres- 
sion that our case is helpless. In our intel- 
lectual life we take the impress of current 
literature, back of which are centuries of 



14 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

anti-Catholic tradition. As yon know, 
English literature is anything but Catholic 
in its spirit and its attitude. Witness the 
books, the magazines, the newspapers we 
are ever reading. Now you cannot fail to 
realize that this constant inflow of un- 
Catholic, not to say anti-Catholic, matter 
has the effect of setting the mind in its di- 
rection, and so turning the soul, indeed 
very subtly, away from the Faith. 

Eemembering all this, note our very nat- 
ural desire to succeed in life, to achieve, 
each in his particular avocation, what the 
world calls success. It is human nature, of 
course, to bend to circumstances, to 
adapt itself to conditions and assimilate 
out of its environment all that will go to 
make up its temporal well-being. This I 
say is human nature, and human nature, 
when left to stand by itself, is a very weak 
brother. 

Considering all these things, then, you 
see that we have much to contend against ; 
that we are not going with, but against, 
the stream, if we are true to our Faith ; that 
we need extraordinary strengthening with- 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 15 

in to resist successfully the foe without, 
and, what I most especially want to urge 
as a conclusion, that we require, as our 
prime need, a thorough training of our 
powers, spiritual and mental, in Catholic 
truth and discipline to make us capable, 
active and valiant soldiers in the inevitable 
combat which we have to face ; in short, that 
we require a thorough Catholic education 
to hold the Faith against the tremendous 
odds that confront us. We need to be 
steeped, saturated in Catholic principles, 
until our mental and moral fiber partakes 
of the nature of that upon which it feeds. 

But I have gone beyond the limits of 
your patience as well as of my time, and 
have not directly answered your question : 
Do you think I am in conscience bound to 
send my boys to a Catholic school? I have 
laid down some considerations which may 
serve you as a premise, but must reserve 
for another letter, the particular circum- 
stances in your case as you put it. Do not 
delay in answering. 

Yours sincerely, 

C. B. P. 



II. 

Oub Eesponsibilities as Pakents. 

My Dear Henry: 

So you think that I was dealing in mere 
abstractions in my last letter to yon; "the- 
orizing in the air, ' ' yon are pleased to call 
it. No, my dear friend ; I was simply gener- 
alizing the very concrete conditions that 
prevail around ns. Eead your morning pa- 
per, the current magazine on your library 
table ; visit the nearest non-Catholic school ; 
talk with your next-door neighbor, and dis- 
cover, if you can, the faintest trace of the 
spirit of positive religion. Eeflect on your 
past experience and tell me if you have not 
usually found in all these sources an utter 
ignoring of religion. Is not the dominant 
principle in all of them what we call secu- 
larism, i. e., the banishment of God from 
the affairs of life? 

16 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 17 

What I wished to convey to you by my 
picture was, that we are living in untoward 
social conditions, whose trend is away from 
the Faith, and, unless we are ourselves vig- 
orous in the truth of positive, supernatural 
religion, we will surely be dislodged from 
our foundations. It is the weakness of hu- 
man nature to go with the tide, and it is 
only the strong swimmer that can buffet 
the flood triumphantly. You yourself are 
a witness to what I say; I speak frankly, 
for you have asked me not to spare candor. 
Moreover, this is a matter touching the 
welfare of souls, in which friendship would 
prove false indeed, if it were disloyal to 
the highest interests involved. 

Now the very putting of your question 
shows that you have been influenced by the 
un-Catholic spirit of the times. You will 
no doubt chafe at what I say, even grow 
indignant, accuse me of being narrow and 
censorious, and aver that you are just as 
good a Catholic as I am. Far be it from 
me to judge you. But have you not ap- 
pealed to me, and in so doing do you not 
force me into a critical attitude ? Am I not, 



18 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

therefore, bound, under the sacred obliga- 
tion of an honest friendship, to point out 
to yon the dangers of your position when I 
apprehend your peril? I play the censor 
but to save my friend. 

You tell me that I am dogmatic, just as 
I was in my college days. You are frank ; 
so am I. You know me and yet you come 
to me. I surmise that you are looking for 
a positive statement ; that in your own se- 
cret thought you are seeking for a very 
positive justification of a stand you hesi- 
tate to take. I shall try to satisfy you in 
spite of the irritation you may feel. The 
cant of the day flouts dogmatism ; contemp- 
tuously labels it an ignorant survival of 
medievalism. In religion as in everything 
else, dogmatism, we are told, is out of fash- 
ion. We must be liberal, broad-minded, 
granting to every one his or her opinion 
without trammel or restriction from au- 
thority. This is true enough in the region 
of mere opinion; but when we are on the 
solid ground of positive truth, it is rank 
falsehood and folly. The vogue of the 
modern shibboleth lies in the uncertainty 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 19 

and infidelity of modern thought. The un- 
belief of today, having no certainty of its 
own, furiously denies to others what it 
lacks in itself. In the question we are dis- 
cussing, there is neither uncertainty nor 
mere opinion. I speak positively because I 
know and do not simply opine. I am dog- 
matic, that is, positive, because the prin- 
ciples upon which I stand are positive, be- 
cause the logical process through which I 
move is positive, and because the conclu- 
sion which follows is positive. 

Let us put the matter clearly. You ask : 
Am I bound in conscience to send my boys 
to a Catholic school? I answer, yes. But, 
you plead, in my particular circumstances 
am I so bound? Before entering into the 
details of your case, let us consider the 
question broadly, and after we have found 
our general bearings, we can consider the 
special conditions, which, you urge, would 
tolerate an exception in your case. I put 
the matter in this way, because I notice 
that there is a weakness in human nature, 
which leans to the side of the exception and 
not the rule. I have seen parents fix their 



20 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

eyes so attentively upon the particularities 
of the case, that they go blind to the prin- 
ciples. The concrete so easily distracts 
us from the contemplation of the abstract. 

I shall begin in a very simple way by 
asking in the words of the catechism: 
"Why did God make us?" and answer, as 
the catechism does: "To know Him, to 
love Him, and serve Him in this world that 
we may be happy with Him forever in the 
next." You smile, perhaps, and tell me 
that you know this well enough; that you 
have been taught this from the very begin- 
ning. Obvious enough, indeed, is this fun- 
damental truth to a Catholic. But are its 
consequences so evident? Do we always 
realize in the practice of life all its con- 
clusions? What does it mean in the con- 
crete? That all things are to be directed 
to that end ; that nothing escapes the ethi- 
cal government of that end. Do you not 
see how simply the broad principle of the 
question resolves itself? 

You are given children that they may 
save their souls by learning to know, love, 
and serve God, under your guidance, direc- 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 21 

tion, and training. That end posited as the 
one essential truth, for there is no latitude 
here for mere opinion, your chief concern, 
your peremptory duty is to bring up your 
children with a view to that end. Now the 
bringing up of children means the educa- 
tion of children. Education, as you know, 
is the development and training of all the 
human powers and faculties. Does not this 
begin as soon as the faculties start acting 
under disciplinary guidance, as soon as the 
mind learns to appreciate the difference 
between this and that? We commence to 
guide our children at a very tender age in 
one way rather than in another, and seek 
to give them a bent toward right things and 
good things and away from wrong and bad 
things. You have observed this in your 
own family life, and acted upon this nat- 
ural parental disposition. Now in the mat- 
ter of religious training and instruction do 
you not commence to educate at once? As 
soon as the child learns to lisp, it is taught 
its prayers, and told in a simple way, suit- 
ed to its tender understanding, about heav- 
enly things and the truths of Eevelation. 



22 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

Is not the essential difference between 
good and bad conduct placed before it by 
holding before its mind the Divine sanc- 
tion of rewards and punishments? Is not 
the Catholic child given as the exemplar 
of its conduct the Divine Child? We thus 
train and educate our little ones into vir- 
tuous habits. We recognize the necessity 
of all this from the very beginning, be- 
cause we appreciate the impressionability 
and the pliability of the childish mind. All 
this is education, the informing of the mind 
by truth, the development of the faculties, 
the training and discipline of the will into 
habits of virtue, and the consequent for- 
mation of character. We insist upon all 
this, and would count ourselves moral mon- 
sters if we failed to impart it to our chil- 
dren. 

What underlies our course of action 
here? Why, that simple question and its 
answer which I have just quoted from the 
catechism. We realize our responsibility, 
that highest and first responsibility, to 
lead our children to God. We realize this 
very keenly in the first stage ; why not as 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 23 

keenly in subsequent stages when larger 
dangers and graver temptations beset the 
path of those whom we most love and 
whose eternal welfare is our chief solici- 
tude? 

Sincerely yours, 

a b. p. 



HL 

The Vital Pbietciple in Education. 

My Dear Henry: 

You tell me that I simply clubbed you 
in my last, and that I must expect you to 
feel sore and resentful after the drubbing. 
"Well, I am not surprised. I did not min- 
imize the situation, because I saw that you 
had. Our bout is in earnest, though not 
in rancor. I hope to force you to a proper 
conclusion, because I know you to be an 
educated man, who can appreciate a logical 
process from an evident premise. I shall 
not take your hard knocks amiss, for I can 
give as well as take, and promise myself to 
force the battle to a definite result. 

I have laid down as my premise, what 
you admit, that the end of man is God. You 
also agree with me, that our life here is a 
probation for the hereafter, and that the 

24 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 25 

whole course of life should be determined 
by its final end. Now, I hold and urge 
that as education is a most important, in- 
deed the most important, phase in the 
process of our temporal development, it 
should be vitally informed by that princi- 
ple. This you seek to distinguish. I see 
that you have not forgotten the dialectics 
of our philosophical disputations at col- 
lege. You tell me that education has also 
its secular ends and purposes ; that in great 
measure much in an educational curricu- 
lum admits of no formal religious element 
at all ; that in our day and under our social 
conditions, when Church and State have 
been sharply separated, and modern life 
in so many of its aspects has become en- 
franchised — surely a queer term for a 
Catholic to use — from ecclesiastical super- 
vision, we must distinguish between sec- 
ondary and subordinate ends, which are 
often in themselves indifferent, and the 
final end, which, though the ultimate norm, 
is too remote to have a vital bearing and 
determining influence upon merely secular 
affairs. At any rate, you say, under the 



26 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

changed conditions of our times, religion, 
by other than formal pedagogical means, 
can supply the lack of its own proper spirit 
in modern educational life by home-train- 
ing and the Sunday-school. 

The point you here urge as a plea for an 
indifferent (secular) education is the very 
reason I advanced in my first letter for the 
necessity of a religious education. It is the 
appalling spread of secularism in all de- 
partments of modern life, its subtle dan- 
gers and insidious temptations, its vast and 
persistent influence, exercised in a thou- 
sand remote and indirect ways, that should 
rouse us to our own peril and to the neces- 
sity of extraordinary measures for the 
preservation of the Faith. In short, it is 
that very distinction so sharply drawn be- 
tween religion and the affairs of life, be- 
tween the Church and practical human liv- 
ing, as the world now conceives it, that 
forces upon us the need of a thoroughly 
positive Catholic education. If we want to 
hold our own we must protect our own 
against the assault of the enemy, whether 
it come disguised or open. Secularism is 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 27 

that enemy, and its blight is deadly. To 
divorce practical life from the considera- 
tion of its eternal end is virtually to deny 
that end; it is practical atheism; it is to 
make God an abstract theory, a speculative 
nothing, and not that living God in whom 
we live and move and are. So much for 
the general bearing of your argument ; let 
us go to the particulars. 

You tell me that education has its secu- 
lar side; that its immediate object is to 
prepare and equip the child for the practi- 
cal struggle of life ; to sharpen and develop 
his intelligence ; to form his character in a 
practical way, that he may be the better 
able to make his way in the world. This 
is true, but it is not the whole truth. The 
general purpose of education is to make a 
stronger man in all respects. In your way 
of putting it, you ignore a consideration 
that is vital; education should not only 
make a man stronger in his mental capaci- 
ties and abilities and in his resourceful- 
ness to cope with the difficulties of life, for 
this is your meaning of character, but it 
should make the truer man, the righteous 



28 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

man, i. e., the man morally stronger; not 
only the man who can make his way in the 
world, but the man who can make his way 
against the world under the stress of its 
temptations, its deceits, and its snares. In 
other words, there is an ethical side to ed- 
ucation, which is paramount and deter- 
mines its true scope. Education may be 
secular in its immediate ends, but it must 
be moral in its ultimate end. It must, in- 
deed, fit a man for the practical uses of 
life; but it must fit him in a certain way. 
Education, in reality, is a fundamental 
training for conduct. Ethics, as you know, 
concerns conduct ; and conduct, or rational 
action, as you well know, is always meas- 
ured by a final end. The norm of human 
acts is always fashioned upon man's con- 
ception of his final end. The man who 
looks upon this life as the be-all and end-all 
will have an entirely different norm or 
moral standard from the man who finds the 
law of life founded in an eternal existence 
hereafter. The man who looks upon time 
as the vestibule of eternity, and realizes 
that his every act is charged with immortal 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 29 

issues, sees life from a standpoint rad- 
ically different from that which, he has 
fashioned for himself who regards the sum 
of existence to be exhausted in the limits 
of time. Now, as education ultimately has 
to do with life as conduct, it must have an 
ethical basis. It will be postulated either 
upon the theory that life is merely secular, 
beginning and ending in time, or upon the 
theory that life is immortal, beginning in 
time and enduring through an eternity of 
misery or happiness as the result of con- 
duct here. As you see, these two theories 
are sharply opposed. Education cannot 
escape this ethical necessity, and every ed- 
ucational system stands upon one or the 
other postulate. In our day all education 
is divided into one or the other of these 
camps. 

We arrive, then, at this position: You 
cannot hold that education is merely secu- 
lar, unless you are prepared to accept as 
your premise the denial of the life here- 
after. This, of course, as a Catholic, you 
repudiate, and must, therefore, reject the 
conclusion. By the same logical process 



30 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

you are forced to hold that, though educa- 
tion is immediately concerned with the 
preparation for practical life, in its ulti- 
mate intent it looks to the paramount in- 
terests of eternity. 

Your statement that there are many 
things in an educational curriculum that 
have no religious element or character, I 
pass over with the remark, that these stud- 
ies by no means constitute an education ; 
and I moreover add, that though there may, 
be some courses indifferent in themselves, 
there are many, and these of the utmost 
importance, which have a direct and inti- 
mate relation with religion. You cannot 
touch history or literature without consid- 
ering their religious bearings, or even 
geography, as it is now taught, without 
some allusion to religion ; and it goes with- 
out saying, that philosophy has a most es- 
sential bearing upon theology. 

When you declare that religion can sup- 
ply at home and at Sunday-school all that 
is necessary, it seems to me that you have 
wof ully mistaken the significance and scope 
of true education; that you forget the 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 31 

weaknesses and limitations of human na- 
ture, and fail to realize the exigencies of 
our present conditions. When you instruct 
the mind apart from God, you are laying 
the foundations of religious indifference. 
The mind that has been taught without God 
in its knowledge, and even that God is to 
be excluded from its knowledge, soon grows 
into the habit of shutting out God from its 
mental horizon altogether. The mind that 
has been developed under a system which 
excludes God and the things of God from 
its consideration, soon logically learns to 
divorce God from its rational processes 
and to ignore Him in all its intellectual 
life. God at home and God at church will 
never make up in the child's mind for the 
banishment of God at school. Then the 
process of religious disintegration sets in; 
the God who does not reign at school, who 
has no relation to the intellectual life, nay, 
is ignominiously thrust out of doors in the 
temple of knowledge, is but half a God, not 
the all-powerful Creator and Judge who 
holds us in the hollow of His hand. Eev- 
erence for Him dies where He is thus neg- 



32 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

atively regarded. When Christ and His 
Church are barred from the schoolroom, it 
is not a long stride to banishing Christ and 
His Church from the heart. Never have' 
the enemies of the Church calculated so 
shrewdly, devised so astutely, and struck 
more successfully at the Spouse of Christ, 
than when they laid their plans to divorce 
religion from education, and so wean the 
child from its Divine Mother by putting it 
to suckle the empoisoned breasts of the 
monster of secularism. 

And the Church, with the mother's in- 
stinct and love, battles for her children. 
She fully realizes the danger. She is filled 
with the love of Christ and cries out with 
Him : i ' Suffer these little ones to come unto 
me; they are mine by the authority of 
Christ; they are mine under the responsi- 
bilities of their eternal salvation." And 
she struggles and labors, in suffering and 
in sacrifice, to educate them in all that a 
Catholic education means. She is not satis- 
fied with the crumbs or the half -loaf for her 
children; she gives them a full spiritual 
feast. She educates them all in all and is 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 33 

not content to give up half to God and half 
to the Moloch of secularism. Body and 
soul they belong to God. Christ said that 
we are to love God with our whole heart, 
our whole mind, and our whole soul; and 
His Church insists that heart, soul, and 
mind belong to God, and she is satisfied 
with nothing less ; for it is her Divine com- 
mission to bring man back to God in heart, 
in soul, and in mind. 

Education does not consist merely in 
feeding the mind with knowledge, but in 
informing the mind with truth, the will 
with good, and training all the faculties to 
the fulness and completeness of the per- 
fectly rounded character. Eeligion in the 
schoolroom is like the sunlight to the plant ; 
it warms, it nourishes, it illuminates. It 
is not sufficient for the plant to gather the 
elements which it takes from the soil to 
assimilate into its own being ; it must have 
the light and air of heaven, the vital prin- 
ciple of its energy, without which it soon 
languishes and dies. Eeligion should be 
the light and aroma of the schoolroom, to 
be absorbed by the child's entire being. It 



34 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

should radiate into his soul through the 
intellect, energize through his will, fashion 
and form his faculties until there is per- 
fect balance of mind and heart and will in 
that moral harmony of his nature of which 
religion alone possesses the gift. 

No, my dear friend; there is no middle 
ground here for a consistent Catholic. 
The Church is jealous of souls, and will 
surrender nothing to the spirit of the 
world, which would divide human nature 
into a distracted being, one part the 
world's and one part God's. To concede 
anything to secularism here is to be led to 
yield all in the end. 

Sincerely yours, 

C. B. P. 



IV. 

Not a Loss. 

My Dear Henry: 

Believe me, my heart goes out to you in 
your sorrow. I was deeply moved to hear 
of the death of your little girl. You know 
that my sympathy is with you in your af- 
fliction and how much I desire to comfort 
you. There is no greater natural sorrow, 
I believe, than the loss of a little child. 
How the tendrils of affection gather 
around our hearts and strike deep root 
there, when our little ones come into our 
lives! And it is like tearing our hearts 
out, when they are taken from us. Death 
in a young child seems so unnatural, so un- 
real. Childhood is the last place in the 
world to look for that dreadful visitant, 
yet with ruthless scythe he cuts down the 
tender flower just in the bud. So buoyant, 

35 



36 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

so fresh with the very ecstasy of life is 
childhood, that it would seem to be immune 
from death; that only old age, bent and 
withered, with all its branches bare of the 
fruit long ago plucked, and yielding no 
more, should be fit for the harvest of that 
blind reaper. Yet the sheaf of death is 
mostly garnered from the delicate blos- 
soms of childhood. We know that human 
mortality is greatest in the tender years. 
But this does not console us for our loss. 
The fact 

That loss is common does not make 
My own less bitter. 

It is a pagan consolation to accept the in- 
evitable and to resign ourselves to afflic- 
tion simply because it is the common lot. I 
remember a legend from Buddhist sources, 
which furnishes a sharp contrast between 
the pagan and the Christian view of life. 
A mother, inconsolable for the loss of her 
infant, appeals to Gautama, the Buddha, 
to restore it to her. Buddha, and this we 
are told illustrates the profundity of his 
wisdom, promises to do so, if she can find 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 87 

a household which death has not visited. 
The bereaved mother seeks in vain, and in 
her hopeless quest learns to realize that 
death is the common lot of humanity and 
to bow submissively to the fatal decree. 
With us, how different! How sublime is 
our consolation! It is not because death 
surely comes to all that is mortal, because 
all humanity goes down to the dust of the 
earth in the end, that we find the assuage- 
ment of our sorrow, consolation in grief 
and peaceful reconcilement with the uni- 
versal affliction of death. "With the eye of 
faith we look beyond the grave; we have 
learned to understand that victory does not 
rest with this ravager of all life. For our 
faith is in Christ, whom we know has risen 
from the dead, the first fruits of them that 
sleep, and that we with Him shall in the 
end be clothed with immortality. How 
sweet, how joyous, how blessed the repose 
of our hope in Him! Yes, we have His 
promise that we shall be with our own 
again in the fulness of the perfect life in 
God ! That little one, from whom you have 
just been parted, my dear friend, is even 



38 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

now in the arms of her God, a pledge of 
His love, awaiting yon. What consolation 
is there like nnto yonr consolation ! 
Affectionately yonrs, 

C.B.R 



Ojst the Soukce of Besignation. 

My Dear Henry: 

I know that resignation is hard when 
grief is fresh in the heart. Our affections 
are so bruised, so shocked; and indeed 
grief is natural. Nor is resignation a bar- 
rier or a check to grief. It is rather a chan- 
nel through which it flows to the great 
deeps of Divine consolation provided for 
us out of the fulness of God's love. It is 
in the treasure-house of faith alone that 
we find the jewel of resignation. It is to 
your faith I appeal. If you were a man 
without faith, one who believes that life 
finds its all between birth and the grave, 
whose philosophy is summed up in Shake- 
speare's lines, 

We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep, 

39 



40 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

I would say to yon, time will heal the 
wound ; the stream of life will sweep yon on 
to other scenes and other interests, and yon 
will learn to forget. But as a Catholic, 
who possesses the sublime gift of faith, 
whose eyes are ever fixed on the supernat- 
ural life, who sees the hidden wisdom of 
God's way, even under the hand of af- 
fliction, leading to higher things, I say to 
you, do not seek to forget, but rather treas- 
ure a chastening remembrance of your loss 
in that larger hope, which promises the 
hundredfold joy of a future gain, when the 
hands of time shall have been emptied of 
all their gifts. Indeed, God sends us these 
trials to remind us that the fulness of life 
is not to be found here ; to chasten our af- 
fections, that they may not wander from 
Him. This thought is a commonplace of 
the Catholic life, but it is fruitful if we but 
take it to heart. We don't realize it until 
we find ourselves under the crushing 
wheels of sorrow. It is only when the 
heart is bruised and torn, like the ploughed 
field, that it is prepared for the planting of 
this celestial seed. 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 41 

Bacon says in his essay on Marriage, 
that "He that hath a wife and children 
hath given hostages to fortune." I would 
rather expect such a sentiment from a 
Greek or Roman pagan than from the 
mouth of a Christian. Had he said "He 
that hath a wife and children hath 
given hostages to Heaven," his remark 
would have been pregnant with the pro- 
f oundest truth it has been given to man to 
conceive. Our children are hostages to 
Heaven ! Here in a nutshell is tlie Catholic 
ideal of the family life. Our children are 
truly our own, only inasmuch as they are 
God's. Is not an affliction, such as you 
have just suffered, but God's way of bring- 
ing home to us this tremendous truth so 
easily forgotten in the hurly-burly of our 
lives ? God has enriched us with this beau- 
tiful trust for Himself, and for ourselves, 
if we are but faithful in its keeping. 
Hostages to Heaven! they are pledged to 
God. They are not ours to lead them as 
we please, merely to our own uses, our own 
pleasures, our own ends. God is their end ; 
nothing less than the eternal possession of 



42 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

God Himself ! Their right is to be Divinely 
led to that Divine end. 

How lucidly does this profound consid- 
eration lead to the solution of the question 
of education which has been the subject of 
our correspondence. The Church looks 
upon all souls as hostages to Heaven com- 
mitted to her care. So she regards our 
children. You must educate your children 
for God, she insists. There is but one kind 
of education which leads our children to 
God, and that is Catholic education, for it 
is filled with the spirit of God. To fail in 
this is to betray our trust. 

Sincerely yours, 

0. B. P. 



VI. 

On Disciplining Young Children. 

My Dear Henry: 

You cannot discipline a child as you 
would a soldier. Childhood has no under- 
standing of the reason of things; it does 
not foresee ends, and has no just appre- 
hension of means. It lives in an atmos- 
phere of simple joy. Dante somewhere, I 
cannot just now recall where, but I think 
in the "Paradiso," speaks of the soul as 
coining bounding and joyous from the hand 
of its Creator ; and Wordsworth, speaking 
of childhood, says : 

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, 
The earth, and every common sight, 

To me did seem 
Appareled in celestial light, 
The glory and the freshness of a dream. 

Joy is a natural affection of childhood. 
Too much and too rigid discipline cripples 

43 



44 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

this natural movement, and so clouds and 
blights the freshness of the soul, the joy 
of innocence. The iron of Puritanism sunk 
into the soul in childhood sours and hard- 
ens it, and often leads to revolt in maturer 
years. I suppose that you have observed 
that boys brought up in the strait-jacket 
of puritanical discipline, when they get a 
chance to relish the first taste of freedom 
from the odious restraint of their younger 
years, frequently rush headlong into ex- 
cess. It is this observation, I suppose, that 
has led to the common notion that clergy- 
men's sons usually turn out badly. Prot- 
estantism used to be very rigid in the im- 
position of its observances upon the 
young, and this doubly so in the instance 
of the families of ministers. Carlyle's 
brutal saying that boys are simply young 
beasts, and that if he had his way, he would 
bring them up in a barrel and feed them 
through the bung-hole until they were 
twenty-one, is simply the hyperbole of 
the puritanical conception of juvenile dis- 
cipline. With its recent decay, the puri- 
tanical regime of Protestantism has pro- 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 45 

portionately relaxed, so that the old say- 
ing about clergymen's sons is somewhat 
obsolete. 

I do not believe in exacting too much 
from children. In essential things the par- 
ent should make an absolute demand upon 
their obedience, letting it be understood in 
such cases that the rule is inflexible; this, 
of course, in all matters of religious and 
moral requirements. But where there is 
no question of these, we should "temper 
the wind to the shorn lamb. ' ' I know noth- 
ing so exasperating, so exhausting to the 
temper and to the firmness of resolution as 
the everlasting "don't" to a child. It 
makes life a burden to both parent and 
child. I learned this early in my experi- 
ence, and soon realized what a road full 
of thorns and briars that parent treads who 
imagines that the ideal of raising children 
is to march them in the straight and narrow 
path of military discipline. I have learned 
to overlook much that in the fervor of 
my first parental experience I regarded as 
my duty to enforce strictly. So stern a 
course makes a child an enemy, thrusting 



46 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

back upon itself that natural flow of love 
which gushes so bountifully out of the 
child's heart for the parent, forcing the 
little soul into tricks of deceit to hide its 
shortcomings, and hardening it into moods 
of resentment against the mistaken harsh- 
ness of the parent, who errs, indeed, only 
through love, yet none the less thwarts 
his own purpose while losing the affection 
of the child. There are many things which 
we must not see. The apprehension of 
too sharp a vigilance drives these little 
souls into a furtive reticence, like snails 
into their shells. They are naturally open, 
sunny, bright. We should not cloud their 
skies by a perpetual frown. 

On the other hand we may sin by the 
other extreme: by overlooking too much, 
by shirking, out of sheer disinclination to 
take the trouble or through excessive affec- 
tion, the enforcement of necessary disci- 
pline, and by neglecting to administer, at 
the required time, that chastisement which 
is a tonic to the wayward soul. A child 
brought up without regimen, needless to 
say, is systematically spoiled and grows 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 47 

into a lawless and unrnly spirit. A way- 
ward child is nearly always an evidence 
of negligent parents. A flower soon with- 
ers with too much sunshine or too much 
shade. There is a happy mean which 
steers clear of the Scylla of severity and 
the Charybdis of laxity. This mean it is 
the part of parents to seek out according 
to their own and their children's disposi- 
tions; for there are always idiosyncrasies 
of temperament and character to be taken 
into account. One child is not as another, 
and while we lay down a general principle 
for all, it is not always applicable in the 
same way. One child differs from an- 
other in irascibility, for instance ; and our 
method in dealing with this one or that 
one must discreetly vary according to dis- 
position and the exigencies of time and 
place. 

In our time the child has not escaped the 
faddist. He is being botanized under the 
microscope of speculating theorists until 
he ceases to be recognized in the healthful 
daylight. We have now a child psychology, 
with writers and lecturers by the legion to 



48 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

analyze, expound, and label the compart- 
ments of the child's soul and the compo- 
nents of his nervous system. It is notice- 
able that with the increase of child study, 
as evolved in our day, the propagation 
of children correspondingly diminishes. It 
may be observed also, that as faith decays, 
children disappear; and where fifty years 
ago every household rang with the happy 
glee of childish voices, there now reigns a 
luxurious silence, or if, perchance, there 
should be one or two little souls in the 
spacious emptiness of the modern mansion, 
there is a hush and oppressiveness in the 
atmosphere stifling the joyousness that 
belongs by right Divine to the soul of child- 
hood. 

Thank God, we Catholics have the wis- 
dom of the Church to guide us in this day 
of corruption ; we still believe in children ! 
That saving common sense of the parental 
instinct, which the Church so carefully 
treasures, still flourishes amongst us, and, 
fortified by the grace of the Sacraments, 
we still fulfil the duties of the married 
state. Though Dante mentions no specific 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 49 

place in the Inferno for those who pervert 
the natural end of marriage, because that 
sin did not prevail in his day, there is a 
logical place whither they naturally sink, 
and that is where the poet saw his old in- 
structor, Brunetto Latini. 

Your remark that you found it hard to 
establish a thorough discipline amongst 
your children, especially the younger ones, 
has led me somewhat off my immediate sub- 
ject. I imagined from what you said, that 
you have been trying to exact more than 
the tender years of the little ones can well 
bear, and so I have taken this occasion to 
make some suggestions gathered from my 
own experience. I will have to reserve for 
a future letter the consideration of your 
charge against the system of Catholic edu- 
cation in general. 

Sincerely yours, 

C. B. P. 



vn. 

A Sweeping Chabge and a Bebtjttal. 

My Dear Henry: 

I have been absent from home for the 
past week, and now hasten to answer your 
last letter, which I found waiting for me. 
Yon tell me that yon are not criticizing in 
any hostile spirit, bnt that yon are simply 
desirons to sift the matter thoroughly for 
yonr own satisfaction and to square your 
understanding with your conscience. I 
appreciate your attitude, but none the less 
I shall not spare your position, or modify 
the vigor of my defense. Though you are 
simply assuming the role of an aggressive 
opponent, I shall hit as hard as if I had a 
real foe in front of me, and rely on the 
stanchness of your friendship to act as 
a buffer against the shock of my blows. 

In the first place you bring a sweeping 

50 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 51 

indictment against the general system of 
Catholic education: that it is backward, 
out-of-date, medieval. Now what do you 
precisely mean by this ? If you mean that 
it has not taken up every fad of the hour ; 
that it has not encumbered itself with the 
bag and baggage of every new theory and 
speculation, and they are legion ; that it has 
not " modernized " itself at the expense of 
emasculating itself ; that it has not rushed 
headlong into unfledged experiments at 
their mere proposal; but that it is con- 
servative and holds the established way of 
a long and proved experience; that it re- 
fuses to depart from the wisdom of the past 
at the beck of present impulse and the 
bidding of the folly of the hour, which ig- 
nores the relation of today with yesterday 
as well as the dependence of tomorrow on 
all that has preceded it: if this be your 
meaning, for this is your meaning when 
stripped of its sophisms, why, then I agree 
with you; and I not only agree with you, 
but I rejoice to see that Catholic educa- 
tors have not lost their heads amidst the 



52 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

wild charivari that is now making babel in 
the educational world. 

But do not mistake my meaning. I do 
not mean to say that the Catholic system 
has no shortcomings ; that it is perfect and 
ideal; that everything in it is good and 
nothing bad. Nor do I mean that there has 
been no kind of betterment or advance in 
things educational in the past hundred 
years ; for in the accidentals there has been 
much improvement, though I fail to see any 
startling advance in the essentials. All I 
do is to confront your sweeping assertion 
with a reasonable denial, stating my 
grounds in a general way. 

What I lay down is this : Catholic edu- 
cation is not to be flouted and condemned 
as obsolete, because it has not accepted 
the fiat of irresponsible doctrinaires, and 
adopted innovations which have no warrant 
in experience and no foundation in reason ; 
innovations, as often based as not, upon 
philosophical speculations that run counter 
to Catholic teaching and are rooted in false 
metaphysical theories. What I further 
affirm is this : that the Catholic system is 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 53 

in substance and in spirit sane and sound ; 
that it is the outcome of a long and varied 
experience ; that it has regard to the nature 
of man in his essence and in his integrity, 
as a spiritual, moral, and intelligent being ; 
that it holds as a cardinal principle that no 
side of human nature can be neglected in 
education without destroying man's integ- 
rity; that its object is to educate man 
wholly, fully, and symmetrically by holding 
a proper balance between all his powers in 
their natural hierarchy; that its aim and 
accomplishment is to preserve this unity 
by the harmonious development of all his 
faculties; finally, that it employs those 
means best adapted to this end. It follows, 
therefore, that the Catholic system founded 
on this principle postulates man's religious 
and moral schooling as of primary impor- 
tance. It furthermore follows, that it rec- 
ognizes education as fundamentally a sys- 
tem of training, and that the end to be at- 
tained is not simply knowledge, but truth. 
This last reflection leads to a vital dis- 
tinction between the general character of 
what in the lump I may call the modern- 



54 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

izing spirit of education and the Catholic 
system. The end kept in view by the 
Catholic system is the acquisition of truth. 
Now truth is the natural food of the in- 
tellect, the nourishment of its activities, 
the informing principle of its perfection. 
It is in truth that the mind rests as in its 
native haven. It is in truth that it finds 
the supreme satisfaction which is neces- 
sary for the fullest exercise of activity. 
It is this possession of truth that actuates 
the powers, invigorates their energies, per- 
fects them in strength. To make the mind 
capable of attaining and holding truth is 
the object of Catholic education. In its 
system, therefore, the main stress is thrown 
upon training the powers and faculties by 
graded processes of exercises, which will 
best contribute to this end. It is to be kept 
clearly in mind that the idea here is not 
the mere acquirement of knowledge, but 
a rounded and balanced development of 
all the energies of heart and mind and soul 
to the attainment of truth. Knowledge 
which comes by instruction is only one of 
the means to this end. 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 55 

Now the modern system, or what you 
please to call the up-to-date system, simply 
inverts the Catholic system, although, in- 
deed, it is not fully conscious of its own 
method. It is founded in the sentiment 
of agnosticism, long ago rooted in the 
Kantian denial of the objective validity 
of truth. It repudiates the certainty of 
truth in the mind, and therefore the respon- 
sibility of its possession. Into this at- 
titude the modern system stands driven 
by the necessity of its own logic, and it 
makes little difference whether it be con- 
scious or not of the skeptical basis upon 
which it rests. Most modern educators, I 
believe, are ignorant of their own founda- 
tions. Skepticism is the premise of the 
system they have adopted, and they drive 
ahead to the conclusion wittingly or un- 
wittingly. This is the metaphysical disease 
that underlies the educational secularism 
of the day ; this is the bane that circulates 
through the blood of the modern pedagogi- 
cal body. The rational postulates of faith 
are denied at the very fountain-head, and 
the possibility of the possession of any 



56 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

ultimate truth, that truth which is the cen- 
ter and circumference of all intellectual ac- 
tivity, is banished from the field. Under 
this vicious conception religious truth is 
relegated to the lumber-room of super- 
stitious inutilities. It follows in the in- 
evitable wake of this premise that the end 
of such a system of education is not the 
attainment of truth, but of mere knowledge, 
the gathering, the marshaling, and the 
classification of data, facts and events ; and 
to these it is limited; for the truth, which 
is the soul back of them, their explanation 
and their reason, is necessarily shut out 
from the horizon of the mind walled in by 
the narrow hypothesis of an ultimate un- 
knowable. To know God is the foundation 
of real knowledge. But modern secularism 
has rigidly banished God from the school- 
room. Its first commandment is: "Thou 
shalt not know the Lord thy God ; and thou 
shalt make a graven image before which 
thou shalt fall down and adore.' ' That 
graven image is humanity. Since the 
spread of the modern system of secularism 
in education the cult of humanitarianism 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 57 

has grown apace. It is the positivism of 
August Comte modeled into an educational 
program. 

I have just remarked that the end of 
Catholic education was the attainment of 
the truth. Let me explicate this idea a lit- 
tle further. We are going down to first 
principles. I take it that a really educated 
man is one who has been trained to arrive 
at first principles. It is because you have 
received a Catholic education that I take 
it for granted that you are capable of the 
analytical process which reaches down to 
fundamental conceptions, to that sufficient 
reason of things which philosophy achieves. 
I am using you as a practical illustration 
of the truth of my proposition, viz., that 
you exemplify the Catholic principle of 
education as the matured intellectual fruit 
of a system of education whose object is 
so to train and instruct (build up) the mind 
as to render it capable of attaining and 
possessing the truth. I urge your own 
trained capacity for reasoning with clear- 
ness, precision and accuracy as a concrete 
demonstration of the inestimable advan- 



58 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

tage derived from a system of education 
whose end is the possession of truth, over 
a system whose end is the mere acquire- 
ment of knowledge in ignorance of the 
truth. But as I have gone beyond the 
limits of my time, I will take up this point 
in a future communication. 

Yours sincerely, 

C. B. P. 



VIII. 

Teuth versus Knowledge as the End of 
Education. 

M y Bear Henry: 

To begin where I left off in my last: the 
Church from the beginning has addressed 
herself to the task in the intellectual world 
of showing the harmony between reason 
and faith. St. Paul charges us with giving 
a reason for the faith that is in us. You 
know how mightily and gloriously scholas- 
tic philosophy accomplished that purpose. 
You also know how utterly ignorant of 
scholastic philosophy Modernism is. There 
is a deeper reason for this than appears 
on the surface. Modernism in the spirit 
of the last three centuries has ignored, i. e., 
cultivated an ignorance of, scholastic phil- 
osophy, in its studious attempt to do away 
with the supernatural. It has disavowed 

59 



60 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

the supernatural under the dominance of 
its passions, and naturally seeks to be rid 
of that higher science which holds reason 
in the orbit of harmony with faith. 
Perhaps you imagine that I am wandering 
far from the subject; what has this to do 
with the question of education? Every- 
thing. The Catholic system of education is 
based essentially upon the scholastic prin- 
ciple that there is concord between reason 
and faith. Modern education, i. e., secular- 
ism in education, takes its stand upon the 
ground, that between reason and faith 
there is no relation whatever. In the lat- 
ter 's premise, man's life ends in time; 
hence it is concerned with immediate and 
visible things only. It has, therefore, no 
ultimate principle of generalization, no 
ground of a final principle, in which all is 
synthesized into a higher unity; no suffi- 
cient reason by which the intellectual life 
is illuminated and in which it rests. It 
simply gathers and classifies knowledge 
under distinct and separate heads, but can- 
not unify it into a whole. So it instructs in 
data and facts. If you observe closely, you 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 61 

will readily see how secularism in educa- 
tion has resolved itself into institutions of 
mere instruction, omnium gatherums of 
everything under the sun without any 
higher bond of coherence. Note its in- 
nate tendency to analyze, to specialize ; but 
it has no power of synthesis. Look at non- 
Catholic colleges in this country with their 
corps of innumerable professors, each in 
his own independent specialty regardless 
of the other; each in his own small work- 
shop hammering out his heap of data ; each 
burrowing in his own tunnel leading he 
knows not whither, nor cares. Observe the 
trend to electivism, to the freedom of choice 
on the part of the student of mere frag- 
ments of knowledge. See how it offers to 
the untrained, unschooled, unprepared, 
unsettled mind of youth a choice in a be- 
wildering field of knowledge, of two or 
three subjects as it wills, according to its 
caprice or its ignorance. What does this 
signify? Simply that secularism, having 
no eyes to see further than the immediate 
present, looks upon education as a mere 
gathering of haphazard knowledge, and 



62 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

has no idea of that further and larger end, 
of which Catholic education has never lost 
sight: truth. 

Now turn your eyes upon our Catholic 
colleges; what do you observe? Institu- 
tions by no means so well-equipped in the 
material order, for they are never or rare- 
ly endowed to the amount of a farthing, but 
institutions with their eyes ever upon the 
higher intellectual life, a system with a well 
graded curriculum, whose end is to train, 
fashion, and develop the mind in the ful- 
ness of truth, truth in the natural order, 
truth in the supernatural order, and truth 
in the correspondence of the two. On the 
one hand, its object is to develop mental 
power in the intellectual life, and on the 
other, to form character in the moral life, 
and so to fuse and unite the two, that one 
shall ring to the other as sweet bells at- 
tuned, in perfect harmony. Observe that 
Catholic colleges do not run to specialism 
nor to electivism. They cling tenaciously 
to the old ideal, the true ideal, the classic 
ideal, the ideal of the humanities, the ideal 
of what is called a liberal education, the 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 63 

ideal of training and broadening all the 
powers and faculties of the mind and soul 
by the study of a required curriculum, 
graded and balanced from the rudiments to 
philosophy, so that the mind may become 
settled in all the components of all that 
education means, not taken piecemeal, but 
in a just gradation of harmonized exer- 
cises, each observing its own proper place 
in unity and under the government of a 
clearly conceived and fixed end. 

You have no doubt heard and read many 
a flout at Catholic education; it was the 
flout of ignorance, not of an invincible but 
of a culpable ignorance. Some years 
ago, € ' the-President-of-one-of-our-largest- 
colleges-in-the-country ' ' took occasion, 
with an insolence born as much of a latent 
fear as of studied ignorance, to class Jesuit 
and Moslem colleges under a common stig- 
ma as types of educational stagnation. He 
delivered himself of this utterance in an 
address advocating the extension of the 
elective system to secondary and high 
schools. There was an unconsciously pro- 
found connection in his thought. Under the 



64 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

hypnotic influence of secularism, he was in- 
stinctively striking at that system of edu- 
cation which is most radically and suc- 
cessfully opposed to the educational revo- 
lution which he represents. Moving with 
the trend of secularism to the disintegra- 
tion of the solidarity of real education, he 
sought to demolish the one great barrier to 
modern educational decadence by contemp- 
tuously yoking it with Islamic effeteness. 
This was the ruse, for it cannot be digni- 
fied into strategy, of a combatant, who fu- 
tilely imagines that he assures an easy 
victory to himself, by contemning the only 
enemy who has the power to dislodge him. 
Hurling this off-hand dart of opprobrium 
to transfix the foe upon the barb of con- 
tempt, he fondly believes the field clear 
and the way of his march to triumph unim- 
peded. With the one formidable opponent 
thus brushed aside at the start, the struggle 
would naturally be short and brutally vic- 
torious over that remnant of the secularists 
who still cling to the old ideal without 
knowing precisely why. But the very 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 65 

character of the subterfuge betrayed the 
weakness of the cause, which found it nec- 
essary to resort to so despicable a method ; 
and the-President-of-one-of-our-largest- 
colleges learned, to the irreparable loss of 
his reputation for astuteness, that the 
system which he with a wave of the hand 
would consign to the graveyard with Islam- 
ism, could produce a champion whose ac- 
complishments and equipment, whose skill 
and vigor showed anything but the mori- 
bund conditions that he would have the 
world believe enshroud, like the cerements 
of death, the body of Catholic education. 

A learned Jesuit took up the gauntlet 
the-President-of-one -of- our - largest - col- 
leges flung down but never intended 
should be lifted. Was it to the surprise of 
the gentleman who had pronounced the 
Jesuit system of education dead and buried 
under the avalanche of the last four cen- 
turies of progress? Have you ever read 
the pamphlet of the Jesuit professor? 
You would never have written to me, my 
dear friend, as you have upon the subject 



66 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

of Catholic education, had you read the 
answer of the Jesuit Father. 

Do you remember the Emperor Saladin's 
wonderful feat, as narrated in Scott's 
"Talisman," of cutting in twain, with a 
single movement of his skilful wrist, a 
silken cushion resting on the edge of his 
scimitar? It was in this delicate way 
the Jesuit professor dealt with the in- 
sult of the-President-of-one-of-our-largest- 
colleges, only in this instance the silken 
cushion was filled with sawdust. Ah, how 
keen and true, trenchant and sure, how 
courteous and elegant, how clear and logi- 
cal, and how profound in its exposition, 
was this short pamphlet of some thirty-six 
pages, riddling the sneering sophism, under 
whose bruhim fulmen the champion of secu- 
larism thought to smash the medieval pre- 
tensions of Catholic education! What a 
sunny ripple of generous laughter spread 
in ever-widening circles throughout the 
educational world when the sawdust spilled 
out from the silken rent in the dissevered 
cushion! I have a copy of the Jesuit 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 67 

Father's pamphlet. I will send it to you; 
but you must return it, as I value it highly, 
both as a piece of admirable logic and of 
delightful literature. 

Yours sincerely, 

C. B. P. 



IX. 

Specialism in Education. 

My Dear Henry: 

Yes, I have taken ' ' a rather high stand. ' ' 

It is time for Catholics to let the world 

know that they stand high. We stand 

high because we stand upon the heights, 

upon the mountain 's top, where the Church 

stands. We stand high because we are 

members of her body, who is the Spouse 

of Christ. In this matter of education we 

stand highest of all. One of our difficulties 

is that there are some Catholics who, under 

the delusion of the world's folly, don't 

know where they stand, and fatuously 

imagine that the bruit of the groundlings 

is the applause of progress. They don't 

see in our Catholic colleges the sensible 

evidences of prosperity, big endowments, 

big clusters of buildings, big corps of pro- 

68 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 69 

fessors, big crowds of students, a super- 
abundance of various kinds of apparatus, 
and therefore conclude that we are not 
1 ' up-to-date. " To be up to date with them 
is to be in the fashion. Now, fashion is 
simply the imposition of the hour upon 
human vanity. The fashion of yesterday 
is ridiculous today, and the fashion of to- 
day will be ludicrous tomorrow. This is 
because fashion is only the incarnation of 
change, the obsession of the spirit of the 
times, whose visage is never twice the same. 
Fashion is begot out of accidental and 
ephemeral circumstances; and when these 
have passed away, its folly is revealed in 
all its ugliness ; it loses its relation to the 
current fancy. Baggy trousers today, 
tight trousers tomorrow; short coats now 
reign, long coats will have their turn to- 
morrow. This not only prevails in matters 
of dress, but in all the regions of human 
vicissitude, and not less in affairs of edu- 
cation. Now, the world, that hurly-burly 
of change, often measures a man by the cut 
of his coat. This may be harmless enough 
in the domain of costumes. But when 



TO THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

there is question of higher things, this 
gage of esteem is a blunder and often a 
crime. When the-President-of-one-of-our- 
largest-colleges undertook to confound 
the Jesuit system of education with Moslem 
methods, he made a blunder; we will not 
call it a crime. But when a Catholic, under 
the impulse of the Zeitgeist, disparages 
Catholic education, he commits a crime. 
He is disloyal, where he should be faithful ; 
he is ignorant, where he should have knowl- 
edge. 

Let me put the matter in contrast : The 
Catholic system of education has held to 
the true ideal; the secular system has 
strayed away from it. The Catholic sys- 
tem has persevered in the right path, be- 
cause, under the guidance of the Church, it 
has ever kept in view the attainment of 
truth as the end of education. The secular 
system has wandered into the wilderness, 
because it has lost sight of this proper end. 
Secularism, ignoring truth as the object of 
the intellectual life, has set up false idols, 
and has started in wild pursuit of two fads 
of the hour, two fashions, specialism and 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 71 

electivism, upon which, it is wrecking the 
cause of education. It w^as only the other 
day that I came upon the following preg- 
nant sentence in an essay ("The Authority 
of Criticism, and Other Essays," by Wil- 
liam P. Trent; Scribner's) by a non-Catho- 
lic writer, who was discussing the subject 
of "Literature and Morals": "It would 
be hard," he says, "to estimate the harm 
that has been done to the young men of this 
country through the discovery they must 
have been making of late, that most of their 
teachers have been specialists — knowing 
only one class of books and caring little for 
literature and art in their widest applica- 
tion. ' ' I think that if you will ponder care- 
fully all this sentence implies, you will find 
the essence of the distinction I have been 
making between the Catholic and secular 
systems of education. You have in this 
passage a striking indictment of the results 
of specialism in education and the affirma- 
tion of its universality. Whether the young 
men of this country are discovering the 
harm done to them by specialism is a ques- 
tion I pass over ; I doubt very much if they 



72 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

are. Howbeit, the writer says that it has 
harmed them, and, furthermore, affirms 
that this injury, which breeds from the 
teacher to the pupil, arises from the mental 
limitations it has imposed upon them; it 
has rendered them incapable of duly ap- 
preciating "literature and art in their 
widest application. ' ' In other words, it has 
failed to educate them, to give them that 
broad and accurate basis of mental training 
and culture which is called a liberal educa- 
tion, and without which a man becomes 
mentally narrowed and short-sighted. The 
teachers are specialists; like the Homun- 
culus in Goethe's "Faust," bottled up, each 
in his own little vitreous habitation, 
through whose contracted neck he views a 
certain prescribed patch of the universe 
and concludes that his restricted field of 
vision embraces the totality of God's crea- 
tion; 

Ye think the rustic cackle of your burg 
The murmur of the world. 



Now, I have heard it advanced by certain 
Catholics, as an evidence of the great ad- 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 73 

vantages to be found in our largest non- 
Catholic colleges, that the professors in 
these vast institutions are specialists, each 
one in his own line the best that can be had. 
The sentence I have just quoted would be 
an admirable answer to that banality. But 
let us consider the matter a little further. 
An institution of specialists is the one place 
that I would most studiously avoid in 
selecting a college for the education of my 
boys. To put an untrained, unformed, un- 
stable mind into the hands of a specialist 
is to deliver it over to intellectual bondage. 
When a boy goes to college his mind is 
crude and pliable. It is then most suscepti- 
ble to those formative influences which 
fashion and determine it for the future. 
This is the critical period ; if it be warped 
then, it will never get rid of its contortion. 
The true idea of education is to broaden 
and straighten the mind, not to narrow and 
twist it. The system, therefore, under 
whose dominance it should come, ought to 
be graded, symmetrical, balanced, and uni- 
fied; it ought to lead to a definite and in- 
telligible end, whence it takes its motive 



74 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

power, and in which it culminates as a per- 
fected whole. A haphazard accumulation 
of specialties, though they range the whole 
gamut of human knowledge, without that 
unity of plan which comes from a well- 
defined end judiciously governing all parts, 
is a mere heap of erudition. And this is 
the confusion to which secularism has 
brought undergraduate education. 

I say undergraduate education, for you 
must not suppose that I depreciate special- 
ism where it properly belongs. It has its 
place in post-graduate or university edu- 
cation, after the broad basis of a liberal 
training has been laid, and the foundations 
are secure enough to bear with ease the 
weight of any superstructure whatever. 
After the mind has been morally and men- 
tally matured, then, and then only, may it 
safely and rationally commit itself to the 
direction of specialism. It will then have 
the power to resist the inevitably narrow- 
ing tendencies of specialism, and possess 
the discretion to safeguard against its 
limitations. 

But when specialism is introduced into 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 75 

undergraduate schools, it becomes a factor 
of disintegration, and reduces education to 
the level of a mere apprenticeship to some 
intellectual trade. When specialism goes 
hand in hand with electivism, as is now the 
fashion, then indeed is havoc made in the 
educational world, and mental devastation 
spreads like a plague. But of this more 
in my next. 

Sincerely, 

C. B. P. 



X. 

Electivism in Education. 

My Dear Henry: 

You have a son of college age. Let us 
suppose that you have determined to send 
him to one of our largest non-Catholic col- 
leges, where specialism reigns, and elec- 
tivism, in the words of the-President-of- 
one-of-our-largest-colleges, safeguards the 
"sanctity of the individual's gifts and will- 
powers." You call your son to you on the 
eve of his departure to this institution 
where he is to be given full freedom in 
the lumber room of erudition, and address 
him in this fashion : ' i My son, before you 
leave, allow me — you must use no word con- 
sistent with parental authority, for that 
would be a gross violation of the sanctity 
of his gifts and will-pow x ers — my son, allow 
me, now that you are about to enter upon 

76 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 77 

your college career, to counsel you in the 
wisdom of my experience. You are going 
to one of the largest colleges in the coun- 
try, magnificently endowed, splendidly 
equipped, with a corps of specialist profes- 
sors, the best that money can procure. You 
will therefore have every advantage in the 
field of education that modern energy and 
large resources can gather together. You 
will, I trust, duly appreciate your oppor- 
tunities, and apply yourself diligently ; for 
you are just at that critical period of your 
life, when your mental make-up and char- 
acter are determined for good or ill 
throughout your life. I hope that my 
words will weigh with you, for they are 
very serious and profoundly concern your 
highest welfare. l r ou will find at this insti- 
tution a freedom of choice of studies. This 
is a privilege that was not accorded to me 
in my day at college. I had to go through 
a required curriculum, embracing a rather 
wide range of studies. But I understand 
that nowadays this method is considered 
old fogy, out of date, and a constraint upon 
the sanctity of the individual's gifts and 



78 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

will-powers. Nevertheless, I trust that you 
will suffer yourself to be guided by me in 
this matter, though I would not think of 
dictating to you in the election of your 
studies, for I would not presume to intrude 
upon the sacred precincts of your individ- 
ual gifts or shackle your will-power by the 
assertion of my obsolete parental author- 
ity. Although your mind is still unformed, 
and your will rather unstable, out of that 
overwhelming respect I entertain for the 
sanctity of your mental and moral gifts, 
which modern pedagogical research has re- 
cently discovered in its wonderful psycho- 
logical advance, I refrain from brutally 
imposing my parental fiat upon you. I 
would rather suggest to you that course 
which the wisdom of my own experience 
and the mature judgment of my own mind 
show to be most beneficial and best adapted 
to achieve the end of education. I would 
suggest very urgently — but mind you it is 
only a suggestion, for I ever keep in mind 
the sanctity of your precious individuality 
— that you elect as the most important 
studies, indeed I may say most essential to 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 79 

a liberal education, Latin and Greek, 
mathematics, literature, history, chemistry, 
physics, geology, some modern language, 
and, as the crown of all, metaphysics. I 
know that a curriculum embracing such a 
range is nowadays looked upon as some- 
what antiquated and not adapted to the 
practical purposes of modern life. But I 
trust that I may be allowed to differ from 
this view. Not that I would aggressively 
assert my opinion, but it was the way I was 
educated, and I must confess to a strong 
bias in its favor. Still I would not insist 
upon imposing it upon you, for the-Presi- 
dent-of-one-of-our-largest-colleges, and he 
stands high in the pedagogical world, 
at least as an executive, tells us that we 
must respect the sanctity of your gifts. 
Go, my son, to the intellectual freedom, 
which the wisdom of modern pedagogy has 
prepared for you. But do, I beg of you, 
remember my suggestion. Take my advice, 
if it be not in conflict with the sanctity of 
your individuality, and although you may 
not now perceive its wisdom, I am sure that 
if you follow it now, in after years, when 



80 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

your mind is matured and your experience 
of life ripened, you will never regret hav- 
ing profited by your father's counsel.' ' 

blessed phrase under which pedagogi- 
cal secularism seeks shelter against the 
shafts of common sense and the wisdom of 
the centuries! The sanctity of the indi- 
vidual's gifts and will-powers! Mirabile 
dictu! Verily folly never lacks a mask of 
sobriety, and even of virtue, when occasion 
demands it. 

My dear friend, in this fictitious paternal 
admonition, which you will pardon my put- 
ting in your mouth, you have the very pic- 
ture of the ridiculous soul of educational 
secularism. Your son goes off with your 
weighty words whistling in his heedless 
ears like the summer wind, if he be the kind 
of lad which the world has known from 
the beginnings of human nature. Your 
words, like those of old Polonius, beat 
weakly fluttering against the gale, whilst 
the pinnace of youth with pleasure at the 
helm goes with the merry winds bounding 
over the sunlit seas. Let me here quote 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 81 

some pertinent words from the Jesuit 
Father's pamphlet {"President Eliot and 
Jesuit Colleges/' by Rev. Timothy Bros- 
nahan, S. J.) which I mentioned in my last 
letter : 

The present writer 's experience does not cover the 
period between the ages of eight and eighteen [the 
period of elective choice advocated by the-President-of- 
one-of-our-largest-colleges], but he does know from some 
years of observation, that between the ages of fourteen 
and twenty, the average boy will work, like electricity, 
along the line of least resistance. And he is confident 
that his experience is not peculiar. To apply to their 
education, therefore, university methods applicable only 
to men of intellectual and moral maturity, before they 
are able to feel judiciously the relations of their studies 
to their life's purpose, must necessarily put to some 
extent the standard of education under their control, 
and almost wholly commit to them the character of their 
own formation. 

Here is sanity. Here are reason and ex- 
perience nttering wisdom. Contrast it with 
the folly, which wraps its absurdity in a 
catchy phrase, whose true application is the 
reverse of its author's intention. Listen 
again to the wisdom of the Jesuit Father ; 
he is stripping the mask from secularism's 
"cipher face of rounded foolishness": 



82 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

Here I may notice the appeal that is made in behalf 
of this policy to the "sanctity of the individual 's gifts 
and will-powers. ' ' "The greatest reverence is due to 
boys/' cries the old Eoman satirist, and who will dare 
gainsay it? But an abiding sense of that very reverence 
inspires Jesuit educators with the belief that it is 
an unhallowed thing to make the plastic souls and hearts 
and minds of those entrusted to their care the subjects 
of untried, revolutionary, and wholesale experiment. 
Precisely because they believe in the sanctity of the 
individual they will not admit the advisability of sub- 
jecting them — as though they were small quadrupeds — 
to novel experiments in educational laboratories. Be- 
cause they know that the boy of today will be tomorrow 
the maker of his country's destiny, will fashion its fu- 
ture, will shape for good or ill the forces that will give 
it stability or bring it ruin, they have hesitated to an- 
nounce a go-as-you-please program of studies and a hap- 
hazard and chaotic system of formation. Because they 
believe the soul of a boy a sacred thing, destined for 
an eternal life hereafter, to be attained by a noble life 
here, they have recognized the delicacy and responsibility 
of their functions, and have been satisfied with a safer 
and more conservative advance. 

Yes, my dear friend, the soul of a boy is 
a sacred tiling, a sacred trust confided to 
tlie father's care and vigilance. As in the 
old mythological fable, the world has been 
placed upon the back of Atlas by the gods, 
so has this weighty responsibility of the 






THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 83 

child's education, the world in embryo, 
been placed upon the parent's shoulders. 
If Atlas were to shake off this burden, what 
would become of the world? If we were 
to reject this responsibility, what would be- 
come of our children? what discord and 
confusion would result in human society! 
What discord and confusion does result 
because there are parents who are blind to 
the sacred character of their trust! And 
that higher other responsibility in the 
eternal life ! Should not this thought sober 
any parent, though drunk with the seduc- 
tions of secularism? 

Sincerely, 

C. B. P. 






XL 



Utilitarianism in Education and a Classi- 
cal Flourish. 

My Dear Henry: 

I have pointed out the dangers to which 
secularism is driving the ship of education, 
specialism and electivism, twin monsters 
of the same inglorious parent. 

Amongst the yelping progeny kenneled 
within the womb of secularism not the least 
noisy is utilitarianism. I put the situation 
under Miltonic imagery to bring it more 
distinctly home to the mind, especially 
when that mind would like to be both deaf 
and blind. The reality of things, ugly 
things as well as beautiful, often finds its 
best recognition in an analogy. 

You know the hue and cry against the 
classics in education: Greek and Latin 
have no practical value in life; why waste 

84 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 85 

time upon them; they don't help to make 
money; they can't be used in business or 
"the strenuous life"; in truth, do they not 
rather impede and hamper a man in his 
pursuit of this world's prizes by leading 
him to believe that he is mentally superior 
to every-day conditions, by "sickling o'er 
the native hue of resolution with the pale 
cast of thought," in short by unfitting him 
for practical issues and living realities? 
And then utilitarianism imagines that the 
mere statement of its position is a sweep- 
ing victory; and so it is, for the mind 
imbued with secularism ; such a mind has a 
natural affection for the offspring of its 
own prejudice. 

Let me at once make a frank admission : 
Yes, I confess that there are many things 
in which a classical education is of no prac- 
tical avail. It won't make a better black- 
smith, or bricklayer, or carpenter, or 
grave-digger, or money changer, or what- 
not in avocations of this grade. I will add, 
moreover, that I have known men, by na- 
ture blacksmiths, forced through a classical 
course by ambitious but injudicious par- 



86 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

ents, to their own great mental agony and 
nobody's good. I have generally found 
that these people soon fall back, by a law 
of mental gravity, from the level to which 
they had been artificially hoisted not with 
their own but somebody else's petard. I 
do not know whether it has spoiled their 
genius for blacksmithing or not. I trust 
that Divine Providence has a special tender 
solicitude for these victims of not their 
own but others ' folly. At any rate, I rest 
satisfied in the assurance that the natural 
weight of their own parts will in the course 
of time find its proper level in the vast utili- 
ties of this work-a-day world, and if they 
have been imprudently led into an undue 
estimate of their own talents, the rough 
bruises of an ever-unfailing experience 
will before long shock them into a realiza- 
tion of the eternal fitness of things. 

But what I do protest against is that the 
misfits of these unfortunates should be 
pointed out as horrible examples of the 
failure of classical education, and as in- 
controvertible evidence of its false valua- 
tion. You remember the old Horatian 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 87 

maxim of fitting the burden to the shoul- 
ders? Dare I quote the lines in the face 
of modern secularism? Hush, ye burly 
winds of the strenuous life, just one little 
moment, that we may hear the whispered 
murmur of the ancient wisdom echoing 
from the classic world, just one little mo- 
ment, I pray, and then you may gather 
again your rushing whirlwinds, and toss 
the fluttering accents of that far-away 
tongue, like dead leaves, in the onward 
sweep of your mighty cyclone ! 

Sumite materiam vestris . . . aequam 
Viribus: et versate diu, quid ferre recusent, 
Quid valeant humeri. 

I wonder if the shade of Q. Horatius 
Flaccus thrilled, just a little, in its Stygian 
night at the distant echo of this unusual 
susurrus of his own lines from the upper 
world ! And not hearing more, did it, out 
of sheer force of its diurnal habit when it 
breathed this Jovian atmosphere, seek 
consolation in the old familiar custom al- 
ways prefaced with the remark, nunc est 
bibendum! Alas ! Q. Horatius Flaccus, how 



88 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

badly did you build your immortality upon 
the fancied endurance of Caesar's empire 
and imagine a vain thing when you vaunt- 
ed that you had built a monument of fame 
more solid than brass to outlast the eternal 
pyramids : 

Exegi monumentum aere perennius, 
Begalique situ pyramidum altius; 
Quod non imoer edax — 

But I desist. Pardon me, ye mighty 
Substantialities of the Strenuous Life, ye 
Titans of Secularism, that I have dared to 
flaunt before your Majesties the mortuary 
lines of this ancient poet, whose bones, to 
slightly paraphrase Sir Thomas Browne, 
have rested quietly in the grave under the 
drums and tramplings of nineteen cen- 
turies of conquest! 

Forgive this diversion, my dear friend, 
this straying into old pastures. I grew 
reminiscent. I was dreaming of our col- 
lege days, and the glamour of old Horace 
crept over my antiquated imagination; so 
I yielded to the soft enchantment, unheed- 
ing, for the moment, the barking of the 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 89 

hound of utilitarianism and the glowering 
eyes of secularism. I realize that I have 
been guilty of the unpardonable crime of 
lese majeste! Mea culpa, mea culpa! Le 
Roi est mort; vive le Roil 

Sincerely, 

C. B. P. 



XII. 

The Object of the Classics in Education. 

My Dear Henry: 

In my last I quoted Horace apropos of 
the point I was there considering, and then 
took a short excursus into Elysian fields 
forbidden to us living with the heavy din 
of modern progress in our ears. You tell 
me that my quotations stirred your spirit, 
and that you actually took up your Horace 
and read some of the "Ars Poetiea" and 
the two odes from which I quoted, and some 
others besides. And the breath of that far- 
away time of our college days came blow- 
ing, like a breeze of summer filled with the 
perfume of enflowered zephyrs, across the 
arid wastes of your fancy so long dried up 
by the steady sirocco of business-life? My 
dear fellow, that draught of Horace evi- 
dently had its effect. You will be writing 
me an ode, before long, singing the praises 

90 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 91 

of Maecenas's bibulous and poetic friend. 
And you tell me that you have made the 
resolution of reading a bit of old Horace 
every day, just to keep the waters stirred. 
Bravo! I am delighted beyond measure! 
Isn't it refreshing to go back now and 
again to those vernal regions of our youth, 
whose fond memory keeps bubbling and 
sparkling, 

O Fons Bandusiae splendidior vitro, 

if we will only go thither to drink! And 
how much keener, and broader, and deeper 
grows the appreciation of the maturer 
mind when we raise these Castalian 
draughts to our lips ! And then not only 
to Eome, but to those original fountains, 
whence Eome herself drank so copiously! 
To hear once again the ancient Muse sing 
the direful wrath of Achilles, son of Pe- 
leus, 

Wrjvtv aeiSe, ©ea, HrjXrjLaSa 'A^tX^os 
Ov\ojj,evr)V 

and hear the clang of Apollo 's silver bow, 
as the angry god hurtles his arrows against 
the offending Greeks, 



92 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

keivq Se KKayyrj ytv r 5 dpyvpeoto /Sioio' 

or pace up and down the shores of the 
loud-sounding sea with the disconsolate 
Chryses, 

B77 S 5 d/ceW Trapa Qfiva TroAiK^AoiV/Joio daXdaarj^. 

But I am off again ; I will stop. To think 
of Greek in the face of utilitarianism is 
like taunting a barbarian with his lack of 
civilization. It was bad enough to mention 
Horace, but to speak of Homer is simply 
twisting the barb in the inflamed wound. 

And now to return to our mutton. The 
classics in education are not intended to 
be an apprenticeship to a trade, to fit a man 
for modern business methods, or to prepare 
him specifically for a profession. Their 
object in education is to broaden, cultivate, 
and discipline the mind ; not with a view to 
this or that, but as the liberal basis for any 
avocation, barring, of course, mere manual 
utilities. Their purpose is to make a man 
more of a man; to widen his mental hori- 
zon; to train the mind's eye to large per- 
spectives and accurate proportions ; to cul- 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 93 

tivate in him a juster appreciation of the 
niceties, the accuracies and values of 
words; to beget habits of mental discre- 
tion and distinction, until he become fash- 
ioned to that broader and nobler mind, 
which soars above pettiness and disdains 
narrowness. A man who has achieved this 
broad, mental habitude is in the true sense 
liberal, free from the vulgarities of the 
illiterate and the prejudices of the igno- 
rant. Blend this state of culture with that 
severer discipline of mind which mathe- 
matics and metaphysics bestow, and you 
add to the graces of culture the force of 
logic and the power of thought. Infuse all 
this, as its practical principle, with the 
habit of virtue, which is the gift of religion, 
and you have your rounded man, developed 
and balanced in all his faculties, har- 
monized and unified in his character. This 
is the ideal of Catholic education. The 
object of such a process is the attainment 
of truth. Here is the man with the open 
mind, enfranchised and broadened. Here 
is the man matured in discipline, trained to 
think, reflect, reason, and act. Does such 



94 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

an education unfit a man for life ? The stu- 
pidity of the objection ! You might as well 
say that the athlete is rendered unfit for 
the arena by the process of his training. 
Equally foolish the objection against the 
value of the classical tongues because they 
are not used in our daily intercourse with 
our fellow-men ; you might as well urge the 
uselessness of the athlete's apparatus, by 
which he develops his strength and agility, 
because he does not actually bring them 
into the scene of his contests. 

I affirm that a man educated along the 
lines I have indicated is better fitted, better 
prepared than one whose mind and char- 
acter have been cabined, confined and nar- 
rowed by the limitations of specialism and 
electivism ; that he will enter upon any field 
of life, stronger, saner, broader. 

Sincerely, 

C. B. P. 






XIII. 

Education and Taste. 

My Dear Henry: 

There is another phase of the subject 
touched on in my last letter, which requires 
emphasis, and the more so because its 
relation to the question of education is 
not always recognized. It is the question 
of the formation of taste. You know the 
chaos that now makes anarchy in the world 
of esthetics. Caprice and opinion, all the 
prejudices of individual likes and dislikes 
collide and conflict in plentiful confusion. 
No objective standard is recognized. Co- 
teries and cliques, fads and fashions, rise 
and fall with the gusts of fancy blowing 
anon from this and anon from the other 
quarter. I do not know whether you have 
observed it or not, but you will find that 
this confusion in the domain of taste, which 

95 



96 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

is correlative with the region of art, is 
keeping pace with the growing prejudice 
against the classics in education. This 
universal anarchy in esthetics goes pari 
passu with the advance of secularism in 
education. Now secularism in education is 
essentially revolution against tradition and 
authority. It is the ultimate outcome, car- 
ried over into the sphere of pedagogy, of 
that rebellion in religious and political life 
whose delirium mistook the prostitute of 
license for the goddess of liberty. It has 
taken something over a hundred years to 
show the world — and even now there is but 
a glimmer — that the red cap may after all 
be close akin to the fool's cap. It is, there- 
fore, refreshing to read in a modern author 
("Life in Poetry, Law in Taste." by Wil- 
liam John Courthope, C.B., M.A., Oxon) 
the following confession: 

No right-thinking man has given up his belief in the 
advantages of rational and constitutional liberty; but, 
on the other hand, every sound reasoner is much more 
ready than he was to acknowledge that Liberty itself is 
not the solution of human ills; that much more is to 
be said than was supposed for such old authoritative 
methods of dealing with men and things as were not 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 97 

long ago accounted relics of benighted barbarism; that 
in fact, the remedy of laisser faire, of letting things go, 
of leaving each man as a separate unit to think, speak, 
and do as he likes, however simple and attractive it 
seemed in the outset, has itself been the cause of a 
thousand difficulties, which require to be dealt with on 
quite another principle. 

No; I am not wandering from the sub- 
ject. I am only bringing you around to 
another view of the elephant, that you may 
see the beast from all sides. The book 
from which I have just quoted is practically 
throughout a protest against the spirit of 
secularism in its invasion of the kingdom 
of art, and especially literary art. The 
author calls it the doctrine of laisser faire, 
but this is simply another name for the 
same falsehood. Throughout his work he 
appeals to tradition and authority, in the 
light of right reason, as the sources to 
which we must return in order to establish 
securely the law of taste, which the dragon 
of laisser faire, like Fafnir in the Niebe- 
lung myth, has of late been sottishly hiding 
in his fetid caverns under the earth. What 
is more, the very chapter from which the 
above quotation is taken sets forth a spe- 



98 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

cial argument, as the summing up of the 
author's discourse, for the retention of 
the classics in education, as the only safe- 
guard of the law of taste, the only barrier 
to the muddy tide of laisser faire, or secu- 
larism as I have named it. Mr. Courthope, 
the author, is at one with Sir Richard Jebb 
in affirming "the advantage, nay, the ne- 
cessity, of recognizing a definite standard 
of taste for the purposes of education," 
and quotes the latter gentleman as follows 
in his lecture on humanism in education: 

I do not think that there is any exaggeration in what 
Mr. Froude said thirteen years ago, that if we ever lose 
those studies (the humanities) our- national taste and 
the tone of our national intellect will suffer a serious 
decline. Classical studies help to preserve sound stand- 
ards of literature. It is not difficult to lose such stand- 
ards, even with a nation with the highest material civili- 
zation, with abounding mental activity, and with a great 
literature of its own. It is peculiarly easy to do so in 
days when the lighter and more ephemeral kinds of writ- 
ing form for many people the staple of daily reading. 
The fashions of the hour may start a movement not in 
the best direction, which may go on until the path is 
difficult to retrace. The humanities, if they cannot pre- 
vent such a movement, can do something to temper and 
counteract it; because they appeal to permanent things, 
to the instinct of beauty in human nature, and to the 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 99 

emotions, and in any one who is at all susceptible to 
their influence, they develop a literary conscience. 



Now let me quote you another passage 
from Courthope. Against the argument 
that the classical languages are not practi- 
cal and useful as a preparatory discipline 
for everyday life, he very pertinently 
answers : 

The fallacy underlying this reasoning is as transparent 
as it is time-honored. The raison-d'etre of our universi- 
ties is to promote liberal education, and the aim of lib- 
eral education is not to impart knowledge for utilitarian 
purposes, but so to cultivate the moral and intellectual 
faculties of the scholar as to fit him, on his entrance 
into life, for the duties of a citizen. Such has been the 
fundamental idea of the English university from the 
days of the Eenaissance; such is still the effect on the 
mind of our great Oxford school of the literae hu- 
maniores. To depart from this ideal, to do away with 
this foundation, to attempt to build up a fabric of cul- 
ture on the study of modern languages and literatures, 
without reference to the art and literature of antiquity, 
would be to reduce the system of liberal education to 
anarchy. Men of independent minds no doubt make 
their way by native force of character; but education in 
itself must be organized, and how is it possible for a 
man to be comprehensively instructed in the history of 
human society, in the meaning of law and government, 
in the various relations of thought, and in the useful 



100 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

and beautiful arts of expression, unless lie begins at the 
beginning? 

It is upon this ground, my dear friend, 
that Catholic education takes its stand. 
It is to this ideal that it has tenaciously 
clung in the face of contumely and despite 
the growing clamor of secularism. Its 
loyalty to the literae humaniores has 
brought upon it the odium pedagogicum of 
secularism. It has been justly deaf to the 
vulgar chorus of the profane crowd. It 
refuses to break with the fecund past and 
tear the tree of science from those deep 
roots, through which it draws its richest 
sustenance. It appreciates at their just 
due, tradition and authority, and in the 
justice of its cause stands firm to resist 
reckless and impudent innovations. The 
event will manifest its triumph. Let secu- 
larism keep up its present extravagant 
pace, and in the second generation from 
our day the only educated men in the coun- 
try will be those who have been trained in 
our Catholic colleges. 

Sincerely, 

C. B. P. 



XIV. 

The Wobld versus God ik Education. 

My Dear Henry: 

When you urge that worldly advantages 
are a weighty consideration in this question 
of education ; that a boy sent to one of our 
largest non-Catholic colleges forms asso- 
ciations and makes friendships which may 
prove of the greatest service to him in his 
advancement in after life, I begin to won- 
der if you have yet succeeded in getting 
rid of the cataract that blinds the mental 
vision of so many fathers, although you 
have repeatedly acknowledged the cogency 
and validity of my reasoning. Is college 
simply a kindergarten to fashionable so- 
ciety, a mere apprenticeship to future busi- 
ness advantages? If this be the proper 
view, why, then away with the farce, which 
you are pleased to call education. If edu- 
cation is to be prostituted to purposes of 

101 



102 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

this character, have done with the pretence 
and call the affair by its true name, mere 
pandering to the most ignoble traits in 
human nature. Be honest enough to say 
squarely that you send your boys to a non- 
Catholic college not for the purpose of 
educating them, but that they may profit 
in after life by the worldly associations 
they may have made there. Be candid and 
admit that you are imperiling their faith 
and sacrificing their true education to 
purely material advantages, as much the 
figments of your own imagination as sub- 
stantial realities. Do not cajole yourself 
by arrant sophisms into the belief that you 
are not jeopardizing your children's faith 
and morals, when you voluntarily offer 
them on the altar of secularism; for they 
are made of the same human stuff as every- 
body else's children, and you know per- 
fectly well that stubble will burn in the fire. 
Be honest ; for honesty does not courtesy to 
folly. Say to your God, that it does profit 
a man to gain something of the things of 
this world even at the peril of his immortal 
soul. 



THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 103 

This is a question of souls. Do you 
weigh the trifles of time against immortal 
destiny? I am speaking as a Catholic to 
a Catholic. Secularism knows nothing of 
souls. Do you remember Dante's symbol- 
ism when he describes the three beasts who 
bar the way of man up the mountain of 
Truth? The lion of pride, the wolf of 
avarice, the leopard of sensuality. This 
symbolism is taken from Jeremias: 
"Wherefore a lion out of the wood hath 
slain them, a wolf in the evening hath 
spoiled them, a leopard wateheth for their 
cities; everyone that shall go out thence 
shall be taken. ' ' Will you send your chil- 
dren out of the City of Faith into the perils 
of that wilderness which Dante describes as 
full of the bitterness of death! How does 
the poet, in whose person man is typified, 
escape the ravenous jaws of the three 
beasts that beset his path? By following 
reason fortified by grace and illuminated 
by faith ; by giving himself up to the guid- 
ance of Vergil inspired by Beatrice. See 
in this the symbol of the ideal of Catholic 



104 THE EDUCATION OF BOYS 

education : Vergil, classicism, and reason ; 
Beatrice, grace and faith. 

Sifted of all its chaff, this, question of 
education comes down to the plain and 
simple realization of the responsibility of 
the trust which God has confided to the 
parent. Should it require certain sacri- 
fices, make them. Parentage is in itself a 
sacrifice. If the Faith is not worthy of 
your sacrifice, it is of no value at all. 
Worldly advantages are merest dross when 
balanced against the eternal values of the 
soul. 

But in truth we make no sacrifice even of 
the worldly interests of our children when 
we confine them to the Catholic system of 
education ; in the proper sense of the word 
Catholic education is alone true education ; 
it is the only system that rounds out and 
perfects character, gives balance and unity 
to intellect and will, broadens the mind, 
cultivates the imagination under the re- 
straints of right reason, and fulfils all that 
is meant by the term liberal education. 

Sincerely, 

C. B. P. 



